Digital lighting technologies, i.e. illumination based on semiconductor light sources, such as light-emitting diodes (LEDs), offer a viable alternative to traditional fluorescent, HID, and incandescent lamps. Functional advantages and benefits of LEDs include high energy conversion and optical efficiency, durability, lower operating costs, and many others. Recent advances in LED technology have provided efficient and robust full-spectrum lighting sources that enable a variety of lighting effects in many applications.
Oftentimes more than one lamp is used to illuminate an environment. When building the environment from scratch, it is possible to hardwire and configure the lighting system such a way that multiple lamps may be energized in a predefined manner when a particular triggering event (e.g., flip of a light switch) occurs. However, such lighting configuration may be difficult to alter post-installation. Coded light (e.g., emitted light modulated to carry information) may be used to facilitate communication between lamps. However, coded light requires that all the lamps in the system be configured to “speak” the same language.
Accordingly, there is a need in the art for a simple solution to configure one or more lighting units to “follow” lighting patterns of various light sources, such as one or more switch-controlled lighting units in the same environment. The solution should be simple to set up in existing lighting infrastructure, and should be flexible, e.g., by avoiding requirements that the lamps be configured to communicate with each other or other devices using complex communication protocols.